Many types of electronic components, such as servers, telecommunications equipment, junction boxes, racks/cabinets of electrical components, and the like, typically have multiple connections for cables to transmit and receive a variety of electrical, optical, data, voice, video, power, and the like, signals. It is common in such an installation to have one or more locations to which many cables are to be routed. In these types of applications, weaving and braiding is a common problem, causing the cables to become twisted and disorganized.
For example, telecommunications services are often provided by racks of equipment housed within cabinets. Each rack typically contains multiple slots capable of supporting a variety of cards, such as line cards, application specific cards, multiplexing/demultiplexing cards, DTMX cards, power supply cards, processing cards, controller cards, and the like, wherein each rack of cards may have capacity to support 512 or more cable connections. In this situation, the wires twisted together become difficult to identify and isolate. Thus, performing maintenance and/or provisioning activities that require a technician to modify the cabling, such as testing line conditions, troubleshooting line problems, accommodating service changes (e.g., changing bandwidth between OC-192, C-48, OC-12, OC-3, Gigabit Ethernet, and the like) is error prone.
This is particularly troublesome when the maintenance and/or provisioning activities are performed without taking the entire rack and/or cabinet out of service. In these situations, other cards within the rack and/or cabinet may be in active service, handling actual user traffic. Disconnecting an incorrect cable in this situation may disrupt service, causing a loss of service and loss of revenue to a commercial service provider. Thus, there is a need for a system and method of supporting, organizing, and segregating cables such that braiding and weaving of the cables is reduced, thereby allowing a technician easier access to the cables.